Assassin's Creed 3 Proved A Challenging Effort To Fit On Xbox 360, PS3

Ubisoft's technical director for Assassin's Creed III, Marc-Antoine Lussier, recently talked about the challenges and “miracle” worker obstacles the team faced trying to bring Assassin's Creed III to life for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

In an interview with T3, Lussier stated that...

"The biggest problem we had was that the machine was still the same after the last two [so] we thought there was no more juice we could get out of that thing. It's almost a miracle and it's all because of AnvilNext. We took the time to really think it through, do it properly."

There was a guy on the team who spent two years just trying to design deformable snow to work for the home consoles...two years.

The thing is, the team is trying to bring new experiences to seven year old hardware. It's an uncanny thing and grossly inhibiting to the creative ventures some developers would like to take. I also find it interesting that so much money is being spent in trying to optimize and condense features as opposed to explore and expand features.

Lussier talks about the visual tricks they had to use for the NPCs since they were taking the series to more open pastures with the American revolution as the setting, saying...

"If you remember in Assassins' Creed we were very lucky that the streets were narrow and we didn’t have such long line of sight and you couldn’t necessarily see the characters on the street, New York is a totally different story."

"We can have a couple thousand NPCs that you see in the distance and as you get closer as you move into New York or Boston, we dynamically switch from low detail NPC to full detail NPC...so you have the illusion of being surrounded by a gigantic crowd."

Optimized LOD for NPCs is nothing new and it was a tactic also used in Hitman: Blood Money during the Mardi Gras stage, but for Assassin's Creed III there will be segments taking place on the frontier where armies will be gathered and visual tricks are tougher to pull off when you can't use tight corners and high geometry to hide the lacking capacity of aging hardware.

So far, Lussier, Alex Hutchinson and the rest of the team at Ubisoft bringing the game to life have done a superb job. Assassin's Creed III looks amazing and it'll be nice to see what the team can do on the next outing, when they don't have to spend as much time, money and resources worrying about optimizing effects for the age old Xbox 360 and PS3.

You can look for Assassin's Creed III to launch for home consoles and PC on October 30th. For more information be sure to visit the Official Website.